Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Day of sustained work on "Stringer," my novel in progress. The POVs were haywire in the beginning pages so I redrafted the first 11.
Also looking at other outlets for two poems that have been "declined." Maybe I'll rework the rejected flash nonfiction piece "Fidel's Gift" too a bit, reconsidering the journalistic style I used. Got to think about the notion that such a style isn't considered "artistic," though.
There are more than 800 literary magazines out there.

New morning to keep on in.
I'm fascinated by the will to create, to write, to bring forth art.
So many songs sung by artists who compose them or cover them, fine musicians who ply the cafés, bistros, local scenes, side stages, online video outlets. Poets who publish their own chapbooks or in web literary magazines or just read in local settings. Storytellers who dramatize wherever some may listen. Visual artists and sculptors who may find a gallery, but if not, still persist and show in open markets. Actors, playwrights, dancers who use the streets or may find a stage. Craft people who find niches everywhere to display what they do. I imagine the profusion of those working and am awestruck.
This very moment even.
And I love to create, to write, to film at times, to photograph, to publish as well, so it goes on. The agony, the discovery, the journey, the connection with something within from which comes form and content influenced by what the senses have discovered exterior to me. That inexplicable will to shape something new.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

. . . It's harder to be patient with traditional processes of authoring, especially when an array of self-publishing options are available. Not that these guarantee acceptance in a marketplace, or critically, or even get a reading.
The thing is to just keep on writing despite rejections, or fears of these. As one poet I know wrote, the demand for books, or any creative piece for that matter, is far lower than the output of works created by those who pursue their craft. Even in the digital era.

Monday, May 07, 2012

Opening the Gate

Short Stories and Poetry by Wes Rehberg

Authored by Wes Rehberg"Opening the Gate" is a collection of five short stories and five poems by author Wes Rehberg, some which include fictionalized biographical elements and as well draw from his experience as a print journalist and social justice activist. Titles of the short stories are "The Enduring," "The Fog," "Scooter," "Tina's Nicaragua Story," and "Jail Birds." Two of the poems have appeared in the literary journal, The Rusty Nail. "Alien Bones" and "Tick Tock."

Saturday, May 05, 2012

I believe I now have a final draft of my short story "Jail Birds," written in the first person. The opening paragraph is below:

The guard brought me to a tiny room with a small wooden table and two chairs. He opened the door, showed me the button to push if I needed help and told me to take a chair. The guard then walked toward the county jail’s cells to retrieve an itinerant young man, accused of murdering a boy, 14-years-old. The charges alleged that the accused man killed the boy, strangled him, after he keyed a scratch on the man’s car door. I was there because he requested a jail minister. This was during a time I volunteered to do prison ministry. Now, years later, I find myself musing about his situation and others I encountered in this work. Especially those that involved homicides. I’m also writing this as a way of thinking back on things. It seems appropriate now. ...

Friday, May 04, 2012

Synopsis for "Jail Birds"
"Jail Birds" is a first-person fiction short story about a prison minister who reflects on encounters with men accused and convicted of homicides, his differences with church doctrine, his troubles as a church pastor, especially after a trip to the Mideast, and the realization he comes to - first draft completed.

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

The literary magazine "The Rusty Nail" has published two of my poems in its online edition. The poems -- "Alien Bones" and "Tick Tock" -- will be published in its print edition as well. Link is http://www.rustynailmag.com/wrehbergpoems.html

Our cabin, sacred to us, sits in a clearing at an elevation of 1,800 feet on Tuscarora Mountain, a massive shale outcropping formed when glaciers halted their movement southward in the Ice Age. The mountain’s name is tribal, and long after the glaciers moved south, the tribal history began when indigenous people, the Tuscaroras migrated north to this region, eventually to be part of the Iroquois Nation. For we two here now, the iceberg and native history are still very present. Like a confluence - icebergs, Tuscaroras, now us, a place we in our lives have inhabited on-and-off for 21 years.

This mountain and others nearby are considered the high peaks of Broome County in upstate New York, in southeastern Broome through which the Susquehanna River flows on its winding journey to Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Its terrain has been quarried for bluestone shale, including our 5-acre site, the quarriers often independent locals eking out a living. It has also been logged, though portions of the area are protected woodlands, and it now is the target of natural gas exploiters because it is lies within the northern sector of the vast Appalachian Marcellus Shale deposit, the gas reachable through the shale layers by the toxic drilling method called hydrofracturing, fracking for short.

Our piece of land bares its ancient history in the shale outcroppings that show through the soil, its native history in the sense we have that it feels and seems all too apparently to have been a worship site, a spiritual space, and its so-called American history in the dirt road that passes by, in the logging and quarrying evidence, in the nearby few neighbors, mostly of European descent, in the nearby dwindling dairy farms, and in the constant efforts of speculators to exploit its surface and depths for wood, stone and fuel.

Yet, and there is a yet, for our time here it will remain sacred in the presence of its history and what we still may be able to share and preserve, with it, in its transfiguration.

About Me

I'm a writer, runner, artist, social justice activist; retired as a United Methodist pastor, filmmaker and print journalist. I've got a Ph.D. in philosophy, interpretation and culture from SUNY-Binghamton. I've also been part of or guided social justice delegations to Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, Chiapas and central Mexico and the Mideast. Much of this work is with Eileen, my creative spouse and partner.. With regard to running, I am a former All-American in track, my best race a 3rd place medal in the 1961 National AAU Championship 600 race at Madison Square Garden in NYC. You may follow me at wildclearing.blogspot.com, at @WesRehberg on Twitter, and on Facebook.